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Posted by abnry 6 days ago

How many of the 170k English words do you know?(vocabowl-870366514258.us-west1.run.app)
501 points | 554 commentspage 8
mppm 4 days ago|
This is cute, but here is the result I got by always clicking the longest answer, or the first one if two seemed equal:

Scientific Estimate: 71,650 words

"Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"

Core Basics: 16/20

Intermediate: 15/20

Advanced: 19/20

Expert: 18/20

Grandmaster: 16/20

This is significant beyond this particular app, because biases like this are found all over the place in popular LLM benchmarks.

srean 6 days ago||
In addition to how much fun it was, it has potential pedagogic value for teaching sampling based estimation.

It would have paired well with an exposition of vanilla Monte Carlo and the benefits of stratified sampling.

Although stratified sampling is good, one can do better in this case by using adaptive sampling, where one uses a runtime (Bayesian) estimate of vocabulary to maximize information gain per question -- preferrentially sample from those strata where the current strata specific estimate has higher variance.

moron4hire 6 days ago||
Lethargic had an option "having the quality of lethargy".
sershe 6 days ago||
Seems too easy compared to the other tests like that I I've taken (my wife and I have a mini thing about this cause as in immigrant I'm not legally allowed to win at Scrabble but I do occasionally), I got 3 wrong and guessed maybe 3 more correctly without knowing them (vibe based i was usually between the two), getting 77k. That seems improbable... Also kinda lazy with many expert words where the longest definition is correct more often than not.
dakolli 6 days ago||
Cool concept. but...

Vibe coders need to be forced to spend one day learning basic CSS before they're allowed to use an LLM to make a website and the internet would be a lot more pleasant as we move forward with slopification.. It doesn't have to be sloppy, and doesn't take all that much studying to at least be able to steer an llm in the right direction to make something look nice. At this point everything is just the same 3 colors and a centered flex column with weird spacing.

nashbash 4 days ago||
65.500, you really get for free a lot of less common english vocabulary when your 1st language is a romance language, not sure how scientific/well tuned the test and number is though but it's always fun to check these sort of tests and how they evolve throughout the years
Johnny_Bonk 6 days ago||
I like this but it should be all operable with keyboard to be faster ie up down and 1234 for options and if its righht you just move on, maybe show synonyms in the success ui.
adammarples 6 days ago||
The words are so easy that this is pointless, and three clicks per word means I'm not going to get to the harder ones at the end. A proper spread of very difficult words split between scientific, historical, artistic, linguistic, colloquial, old, new, colonial, etc would give a better sampling. If I know "palimpsest" I probably know "pledge" you don't need to cover much of the easy stuff.
timonoko 5 days ago||
One soon discovers that those fancy words are not Ænglish words at all. If you know 6 other languages, you will pass this test 100%.
alkyon 6 days ago|
I only got 4 wrong as a non-native speaker. Okay, I'm widely read in English, but among LLM-generated definitions it's just too easy to spot the right one.
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